Making it up as I go

Ever have one of those days when you have so many projects going on that you can't decide which one to work on, so you end up working on nothing?  Yeah, I've had those, too!  I almost had one this week, in fact.  I have a lot of unfinished stuff laying around here and I organized it all and then couldn't decide which one to take on first.

Thankfully, I have had this same problem before, so I knew the best thing to do was just grab whatever was closest and start stitching.  That's how I ended up working on the 1-1/2 inch square project.  In the process of stitching up more blocks I also figured out how I plan to set them:

Yep, this will be it!  As you can see, the first thing I did was put a 1-1/2 inch white strip around the 100-patch blocks.  This stabilized all the little seams on the edges of that block and also meant that there would be no nightmare scenarios that would involve matching all those seams from block to block.  (Can you imagine?)

I had played around with having strips of alternating white and colored squares surrounding each block, but it turns out that all those strips of squares are really stretchy!  Plus I had this thing about making sure all the seams matched up with the seams in the block, even though they were separated by that solid white.  Talk about crazy-making!  So I gave up on that and went with just the squares in the corners.  That way I'll still get to use up some more of the eleventy-billion squares I have and I'll get this cool pattern:

Is that cool or what?  If I use 4-patches as cornerstones with some white sashing, I'll use up even more squares and have a super-cool secondary pattern too.  And I am all about the super cool secondary pattern!  For some reason I hate making 4-patches, but I'll do it for this.

These blocks are actually going pretty quickly, considering.  The hard part is sorting out all the colors:

I know I should have sorted them all at once, but I did start out with about 12,000 of these babies, and that's a lot to sort through!

I don't know how many of these blocks I'll eventually make or how big the quilt will be, but I'm pretty sure it will look good, and I'm having a good time making it, even if it is a mess:

Hope you all are having a good time making fun messes too!  It's still raining almost every day and it's pretty cold for May, and I have no garden, so I expect to get a bunch of sewing time in this week.  At least I hope that's how it goes--you know what happens with sewing plans!

Linking to Let's Bee Social and Oh Scrap!